Mill's Two Views on Belief

Philosophy ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 59 (227) ◽  
pp. 79-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
A.J. Mandt
Keyword(s):  
Human Subject ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Newtonian Mechanics ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Philosophical Doctrine

Philosophical traditions often bear the seeds of their own destruction.Their seminal insights are achieved in part by ignoring or distorting certain aspects of human experience. Insights and mistakes grow from the same roots. In transitional periods, this dialectic leads to strange reversals in allegiance and to unexpected and even unnoticed shifts in philosophical doctrine. Classical empiricism presents an example of this when one shifts attention from its treatment of epistemological questions to problems of humanaction, or to the relation of knowledge and action. The empiricist analysisof knowledge in terms of the succession and conjoining of ideas and impressions in the mind leaves the mind itself a passive spectator that undergoes its contents. On this view, the human subject lacks any distinctive spontaneity or power of initiative. The mind's internal processes are conceived ofon analogy with Newtonian mechanics and are distinguished by their law-likeregularity. The subject is not, and cannot conceive itself as being, a kindof agency. Historically, the consequences of this are evident in Berkeley's difficulties regarding ‘active spirit’, of which we have ‘notions’ but not perceptions, and in the often remarked upon disparities between Parts I and III of Hume's Treatise.

Prescriptive Power: Biologism, Biopsychiatry and Drug-centred Psychopharmacology

Somatechnics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 291-309
Author(s):  
Francis Russell
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Mental Illnesses ◽  
False Consciousness ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Biological Ontology ◽  
Health Discourse

This paper looks to make a contribution to the critical project of psychiatrist Joanna Moncrieff, by elucidating her account of ‘drug-centred’ psychiatry, and its relation to critical and cultural theory. Moncrieff's ‘drug-centred’ approach to psychiatry challenges the dominant view of mental illness, and psychopharmacology, as necessitating a strictly biological ontology. Against the mainstream view that mental illnesses have biological causes, and that medications like ‘anti-depressants’ target specific biological abnormalities, Moncrieff looks to connect pharmacotherapy for mental illness to human experience, and to issues of social justice and emancipation. However, Moncrieff's project is complicated by her framing of psychopharmacological politics in classical Marxist notions of ideology and false consciousness. Accordingly, she articulates a political project that would open up psychiatry to the subjugated knowledge of mental health sufferers, whilst also characterising those sufferers as beholden to ideology, and as being effectively without knowledge. Accordingly, in order to contribute to Moncrieff's project, and to help introduce her work to a broader humanities readership, this paper elucidates her account of ‘drug-centred psychiatry’, whilst also connecting her critique of biopsychiatry to notions of biologism, biopolitics, and bio-citizenship. This is done in order to re-describe the subject of mental health discourse, so as to better reveal their capacities and agency. As a result, this paper contends that, once reframed, Moncrieff's work helps us to see value in attending to human experience when considering pharmacotherapy for mental illness.

Madness, virtue, and ecology: A classical Indian approach to psychiatric disturbance

2021 ◽  
pp. 095269512098224
Author(s):  
Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
Philosophical Anthropology ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Psychiatric Disturbance ◽  
Indian Medical ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Moral Relationship

The Caraka Saṃhitā (ca. first century BCE–third century CE), the first classical Indian medical compendium, covers a wide variety of pharmacological and therapeutic treatment, while also sketching out a philosophical anthropology of the human subject who is the patient of the physicians for whom this text was composed. In this article, I outline some of the relevant aspects of this anthropology – in particular, its understanding of ‘mind’ and other elements that constitute the subject – before exploring two ways in which it approaches ‘psychiatric’ disorder: one as ‘mental illness’ ( mānasa-roga), the other as ‘madness’ ( unmāda). I focus on two aspects of this approach. One concerns the moral relationship between the virtuous and the well life, or the moral and the medical dimensions of a patient’s subjectivity. The other is about the phenomenological relationship between the patient and the ecology within which the patient’s disturbance occurs. The aetiology of and responses to such disturbances helps us think more carefully about the very contours of subjectivity, about who we are and how we should understand ourselves. I locate this interpretation within a larger programme on the interpretation of the whole human being, which I have elsewhere called ‘ecological phenomenology’.

scholarly journals I. The Croonian Lecture.—On the theory of the vertebrate skull

1859 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 381-457 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Biological Science ◽  
The Other ◽  
Small Space ◽  
Half Century ◽  
Organic Structure ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Articles Of Faith ◽  
The Mind

The necessity of discussing so great a subject as the Theory of the Vertebrate Skull in the small space of time allotted by custom to a lecture, has its advantages as well as its drawbacks. As, on the present occasion, I shall suffer greatly from the disadvantages of the limitation, I will, with your permission, avail myself to the uttermost of its benefits. It will be necessary for me to assume much that I would rather demonstrate, to suppose known much that I would rather set forth and explain at length; but on the other hand, I may consider myself excused from entering largely either into the history of the subject, or into lengthy and controversial criticisms upon the views which are, or have been, held by others. The biological science of the last half-century is honourably distinguished from that of preceding epochs, by the constantly increasing prominence of the idea, that a community of plan is discernible amidst the manifold diversities of organic structure. That there is nothing really aberrant in nature; that the most widely different organisms are connected by a hidden bond; that an apparently new and isolated structure will prove, when its characters are thoroughly sifted, to be only a modification of something which existed before,—are propositions which are gradually assuming the position of articles of faith in the mind of the investigators of animated nature, and are directly, or by implication, admitted among the axioms of natural history.

The Imaginary Questionnaire

1950 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 76-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. W. Whitfield
Keyword(s):  
Human Subject ◽  
Human Behaviour ◽  
Choice Response ◽  
Questionnaire Data ◽  
Statistical Concept ◽  
Appropriate Treatment ◽  
Alternative Meaning ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Statistical Problems

The experiment was designed to throw some light on the statistical problems in the analysis of questionnaire data. Previous work (unpublished) suggested that a simple choice response was partially determined by previous responses; and also that the nature of the determination was changed with changing length of series. A “null” experiment was devised in the form of a questionnaire without any questions, and the distribution of responses was studied with respect to the problems formulated. The observations are discussed in three sections. In the statistical discussion an alternative meaning to overall association or dissociation is advanced. This: relates association or dissociation to human behaviour in the serial response situation, rather than to qualities of the questionnaire. It is further suggested that association between specific, questions should be tested against the association in the whole questionnaire, and an appropriate treatment is indicated. The observations depart from statistical randomness in certain ways. Answers made up almost entirely of one form of response are given less often than would be expected. Long sequences of the same type of response are relatively infrequent, and sequences of alternation of response are also rare. As the material is “null” it implies that the human concept of randomness differs from the statistical concept. An attempt is made to define the human concept of randomness. It appears that a series of responses which has a pattern, or for which the subject can postulate a simple “cause” will not be accepted as random by the human subject. This raises problems of a perceptual and cognitive nature. It also has a bearing on the design of questionnaires. or experiments involving serial responses.

Tendency of mass people to misunderstand (intentionally or not) the agony of the psychiatric patient and tormenting them as a subject of mockery with an emphasize on somatic-symptom disorder

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deep Bhattacharjee
Keyword(s):  
Somatic Symptom ◽  
Psychiatric Treatment ◽  
Somatic Symptom Disorder ◽  
Physical Pain ◽  
The People ◽  
Pain And Suffering ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Affected Subject

Psychiatric disorders’ or as emphasized in the paper in the form of somatic-symptom disorder, a sub-category of Schizophrenia has been from the ancient of the human civilization, when the medicinal approach and treatment of the subject hasn’t been developed yet, the notion of the affected subject to be under some spiritual subjugation has automatically been implied on the minds of the people which leads to immense torture and torment of the subject by the society. However, in the modern medical scenario, the situation has shifted from spiritual/evilness to the extreme derision where it has been already implied on the healthy societies brain that, the subject is intentionally acting like a patient or it’s a ‘disease of the mind’ with no associated physical pain which being attributed to the tendency of late diagnosis and recovery, makes the subject a sheer block of ‘sarcasm’ among the healthy society where they tries their best to make ‘the fun out of him’ as regards to his continuous pain and suffering. This generally amplified by the delay in the starting of the treatment for the difficulty of the doctors to diagnose the disease, as not so developed instruments are still in their infancy to detect and derelict the mental disorders, where in most of the time, the golden period of diagnosis is either over or even if psychiatric treatment is initiated can lead to a more defocused effects as doctors itself finds it difficult to approach the right medicine to the disordered person, where, in case, they have to go from one doctor to another in the risk of a trial and error effect.

Responsibility before the World: Cinema, Perspectivism and a Nonhuman Ethics of Individuation

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 386-410
Author(s):  
Andrew Lapworth
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
Ethical Responsibility ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
World Cinema ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
Humanities And Social Sciences

The recent ‘nonhuman turn’ in the theoretical humanities and social sciences has highlighted the need to develop more ontological modes of theorising the ethical ‘responsibility’ of the human in its relational encounters with nonhuman bodies and materialities. However, there is a lingering sense in this literature that such an ethics remains centred on a transcendent subject that would pre-exist the encounters on which it is called to respond. In this essay, I explore how Gilles Deleuze's philosophy offers potential opening for a more ontogenetic thinking of a ‘nonhuman ethics’. Specifically, I focus on how his theory of ‘individuation’ – conceived as a creative event of emergence in response to immanent ontological problems – informs his rethinking of ethics beyond the subject, opening thought to nonhuman forces and relations. I argue that if cinema becomes a focus of Deleuze's ethical discussions in his later work it is because the images and signs it produces are expressive of these nonhuman forces and processes of individuation, generating modes of perception and duration without ontological mooring in the human subject. Through a discussion of Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor's experimental film –  Leviathan (2012)  – I explore how the cinematic encounter dramatises different ethical worlds in which a multiplicity of nonhuman ‘points of view’ coexist without being reduced to a hierarchical or orienting centre that would unify and identify them. To conclude, I suggest that it is through the lens of an ethics of individuation that we can grasp the different sense of ‘responsibility’ alive in Deleuze's philosophy, one oriented not to the terms of the already-existing but rather to the nonhuman potential of what might yet come into being.

Alessandro Gavazzi: a barnabite friar and the risorgimento (Presidential Address)

1975 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 303-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
Basil Hall
Keyword(s):  
Presidential Address ◽  
Memento Mori ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Mind

Think nowHistory has many cunning passages, contrived corridorsAnd issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,Guides us by vanities. Think nowShe gives when our attention is distractedAnd what she gives, gives with such supple confusionsThat the giving famishes the craving. Gives too lateWhat’s not believed in, or if still believed,In memory only, reconsidered passion.Historians no doubt have problems enough without setting before themselves that ‘memento mori’ from Eliot, who, though he was describing an old man seeking to understand his own past, leaves nevertheless an echo in the mind disturbing to those who practise the historian’s craft. We assume a confidence which in our heart of hearts we do not always, or should not always, possess. Eliot’s words not only demonstrate the difficulty of one man understanding his own past, but also the historian’s difficulty in understanding those whom they select for questioning from among the vast multitudes of the silent dead, whose deeds, artifacts, ideas, passions, hopes and memories have died with them. We dig into the past, obtain data from archives, brush off the objects found, collect statistics, annotate, arrange, describe, establish a chronology – but do we effectively understand the dead, especially since we are affected by our own beliefs, customs and ideologies? We are, of course, all aware of this: we silently scorn the lecturer who raises these diffident hesitations. For we know our duty: we examine all that we can, we describe our findings, we annotate them, we draw conclusions, or leave our demonstrations to speak for themselves. There are reasons, as I shall hope to show, that these considerations – Eliot’s ominous words and our determination not to be disquieted by them – bear upon the subject of this paper, the almost forgotten Alessandro Gavazzi.

“Stonehenge in the Mind” and “Stonehenge on the Ground”:

2018 ◽  
Vol 77 (3) ◽  
pp. 285-299 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Roark
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Formal Analysis ◽  
Original Text ◽  
Existing Structures ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Mind

In Stone-Heng Restored (1655), Inigo Jones, the father of English neoclassicism, used drawings, histories, and questionable logic to argue that Stonehenge was built by the ancient Romans and that it originally exhibited perfect Platonic geometries. This argument was never given much credence, but by 1725 the subject matter and the architect had received enough attention that two book-length responses (a challenge and a defense) were published, and both were then republished in a single volume alongside Jones's original text. While most Jones scholars have neglected this work because of its logical and historical shortcomings, Ryan Roark argues in “Stonehenge in the Mind” and “Stonehenge on the Ground”: Reader, Viewer, and Object in Inigo Jones's Stone-Heng Restored (1655) that it was in fact exemplary of what made Jones, for many, a protomodern architect and scholar. Rather than viewing Jones's book as an earnest attempt to prove a historical inaccuracy, Roark considers it as an exercise in formal analysis, one that set the precedent for the contemporary pedagogical trend of using geometric simplifications of existing structures as a first step in new design. Jones's idiosyncratic reading of Stonehenge belied the idea that such analysis could be anything but intensely reliant on the subjectivity of both architect and viewer.

Insanity following Surgical Operations

1889 ◽  
Vol 35 (149) ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. T. Dent
Keyword(s):  
Medical Science ◽  
Surgical Operation ◽  
Additional Information ◽  
Surgical Measures ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Surgical Operations

So far as my researches extend little attention has been paid to the subject of this paper. Yet I think it would be rash to assume that what is unrecorded is necessarily rare, even in days when so much more is put into print than any of us can either read or mark, much less digest, and when the number of writers seems in danger of exceeding the number of readers. Insanity, in some degree, as a sequela of surgical operation, though certainly rare, is, I believe, less uncommon than usually supposed, and it is chiefly in the hope of eliciting additional information from others that I venture to record my own small experience. On two subjects medical science has still an infinite deal to learn: first, the influence of disease on the mind; secondly, the influence of mind on disease. In attempting to contribute a little to the first-mentioned subject, I can really deal only with a subdivision of it, viz., the effects that may be produced on the mind by surgical measures undertaken for the relief of disease.

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